Helping you understand the big ideas behind our special places...

The National Trust and Oxford University have teamed up in a bid to enhance the visitor experience at our historic properties and places.

Trusted Source is an online knowledge bank of concise, engaging and accessible articles about history, culture and the natural environment, written by members of the academic community and our own specialists. The resulting articles explore a range of subjects from different perspectives, therefore offering visitors a spectrum of insights into our diverse portfolio of properties, places and collections.

These articles will be shared throughout the National Trust to be used in staff and volunteer induction training, by room guides in houses, for interpretation at our places and in guidebooks. They are also on the internet for everyone to access.

What are Knowledge Transfer Partnerships?

Knowledge Transfer Partnerships (KTPs) are part-government funded programmes intended to help spread knowledge from the academic world more widely to public bodies and the business sector. KTPs are most frequently employed within the science and technology industries, and this is the first time that such a project has been awarded to the Humanities Division at Oxford and the National Trust.

"
We want to tell the stories of the collections and properties in our care in an engaging, accurate and inspiring way. Using the latest academic research, Trusted Source is helping us enhance the experience we give our members and visitors, uncover new information and deepen our understanding of the heritage in our care."

- Dame Helen Ghosh, Director-General

Project legacy

Over two years this project will establish a clear methodology for sharing knowledge between these two leading organisations which we hope will have a significant and lasting impact upon the work of both.

In doing so, we will establish a blueprint for collaboration that can be adopted by other academic institutions and heritage organisations across the UK, thereby encouraging further stories about places to be told and enriched through research.

There are over 2000 known sites of deserted medieval villages in England. Some villages were depopulated gradually by disease, enclosure or depleted local resources, others destroyed for aesthetic reasons by landowners, and others swept away by the effects of a changing climate.

First marketed at the turn of the 1770s, Coade stone was a remarkable new building material. Using a recipe which was not fully understood until the 1990s, its makers claimed to have produced the first ever ‘artificial stone’.
Tough and hard-wearing, it offered new opportunities for fine-detailed decoration. Just as extraordinary as the stone was the person who sold it: Eleanor Coade, one of the few women to be acknowledged as a major influence on eighteenth century architecture.

Lancelot ‘Capability’ Brown is Britain’s most famous landscape designer, who codified the English landscape style and worked at over 250 sites, for a client list that included the majority of the House of Lords. Brown learnt his trade experimenting at Stowe, making his mark on the landscape before moving on to transform the the English countryside and many aristocratic estates.

The ‘Gothic’ is a style associated with late medieval English art and architecture; its many revivals are attempts to style literature, architecture, visual and decorative art, landscape design, and music after its features.

Featured Trusted Source contributors...

I specialise in English literature, history, and culture from 1800 to the present day, and also have research interests in political history and theatre. I enjoy forging connections between my research in heritage studies and the history of the countryside with institutions that conserve historical sites and landscapes. I am a contributor to the Trusted Source project.

My research looks at popular politics and popular political participation during the Italian Risorgimento: the period from 1815 to 1870 in which Italy was unified as a single state. I am interested in the ways ‘ordinary people’ – the shopkeeper, the artisan, the peasant – understood and made sense of political changes and ideas.

My research is focussed on the history of the British Conservative Party and brings together approaches from political history, intellectual history and cultural studies. I am interested in the way in which politics is lived by individuals as an everyday experience expressed and constructed through art, music, clothing, and objects. I am a contributor to the Trusted Source project.